Missing Dependencies - Transition from Development to Production

[Rajeshree]

I created one model driven power app solution. It consists of custom tables, standard tables, Approval workflows, custom security roles, default security roles, power bi dashboard, column securities and many more components. It is working totally fine in development environment. I exported it. Now I created new production environment for Testing the application. When I am importing the solution, it is showing missing dependencies error and failing the import. It says that 'Approvals User' security role is missing. I checked in admin center it is not there. But it was pre-existing role in dev environment. Even Approval tables associated with this role are not available in this new production environment. Below is the error log:

<MissingDependency><Required type=\"20\" displayName=\"Approvals User\" solution=\"msdyn_FlowApprovalsCore (2.0.4.7)\" id=\"{b9b08637-acf6-e711-a95a-000d3a11f5ee}\"><package>msdyn_FlowApprovals (2.0.4.7)</package></Required><Dependent type=\"80\" schemaName=\"new_PRTracker\" displayName=\"PR Tracker\" /></MissingDependency>

Can someone suggest how to tackle this? Why there are less default tables and less default roles in production environment? Can't I just export these roles from dev? (I didn't find the option to do so). Is there a way to solve this? I can't create similar new role because tables used in that security role in dev are also missing in this environment.

[cchannon]

Couple answers there...

1. Microsoft rolls out updates to different environments at different times. Because of this, your Dev will (about half the time) get updates before your prod. Therefore, it is always possible that a solution you have packaged from Dev is dependent on components that MSFT hasn't yet installed in Prod. You mitigate this by having as few dependencies on OOB forms and views as possible (as these carry the greatest dependency change risk).

2. The best way to resolve a dependency on something OOB that you don't actually need is to figure out what the dependency is and remove it. That error message above might not be the whole story (when a solution import hits an error like this it stops immediately, so there is no guarantee there aren't more errors like this waiting for you) but it does at least tell you the first problem here. That is, your PR tracker is the thing that has this dependency. I don't know what type 80 is (and it isn't listed in the docs) but you can probably recognize that component by name - maybe a Connection or Connection Reference?

Anyway, just going based on the solution name "msdyn_FlowApprovalsCore (2.0.4.7)" your dependency is on the OOB Approvals app or connector and that's your problem. Is your "dev" environment the Default Env? If so, this is a very bad idea. You should be using a free personal Dev environment instead (link). The Default Env is hands down the worst possible place to do dev.

[Rajeshree · Accepted solution]

After a lot of struggles, I am able to resolve this. I just created one dummy workflow in my target environment. I added first step of approval workflow. It automatically generated all approval related OOBs in my target test environment. After that I am able to import solution without any errors.